In 2025, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) has continued to evolve its approach to regulation, with new expectations and priorities for registered providers across health and social care. Whether you are an established provider or preparing for your first CQC inspection, understanding what is required has never been more critical to achieving a positive outcome.
Key Expectations for 2025
- Strong Governance and Leadership
The CQC expects registered providers to demonstrate effective governance structures that ensure safe, high-quality care. This means robust systems for risk management, regular audits, and clear lines of accountability from board to front-line staff. An ideal starting point is to appoint a governance lead who has dedicated time to strategically plan and deliver sound governance frameworks and outputs.
- Compliance with Updated Quality Statements
Following the rollout of the revised assessment framework, providers must be able to evidence compliance with all relevant quality statements. This includes demonstrating how your service meets the needs of people using your services and continually reviewing your approach in line with best practice. There is a focus on feedback from patients or clients, staff and other stakeholders so consider how you will demonstrate this.
- Focus on Health Inequalities
Tackling health inequalities is a central CQC priority for 2025. Providers need to show clear action plans for addressing disparities in access, experience, and outcomes—especially for groups at greater risk of discrimination or exclusion. Ensure everyone has completed autism awareness and learning disability training and can demonstrate how they put this into action. The Oliver McGowan training is available free of charge here.
- Proactive Safety Culture
A proactive approach to safety is essential. The CQC will look for evidence that providers actively learn from incidents, near-misses, and feedback—embedding a culture of continuous improvement to prevent harm. This links back into governance and there is an expectation you have a robust safety culture across all areas.
- Workforce Wellbeing and Competence
Ensuring your staff are skilled, supported, and well-led remains a key inspection focus. This means robust recruitment checks, ongoing training, and strategies to promote staff wellbeing in increasingly challenging times. Supervision sessions for clinical staff should be planned, delivered and documented and based on role, knowledge and experience. A useful tool is a table detailing the role, supervisor and regularity of the sessions as a starting point.
- Transparent Use of Data
With digital transformation accelerating, providers are expected to make good use of data to drive improvements, monitor outcomes, and ensure transparency with both service users and regulators.
- Demonstrating Person-Centred Care
Providers must put people at the heart of everything they do—tailoring services, involving people in decision-making, and responding to feedback in a meaningful way.
Preparing for Your Next Inspection
The CQC’s approach in 2025 will be more targeted and intelligence-led than ever before, with an increased focus on evidence and outcomes. Providers should regularly review their policies, audit their own compliance, and ensure all staff understand their roles and responsibilities when it comes to quality and safety.
A baseline assessment is an ideal starting point where you review if you have processes and evidence to meet all 34 quality statements then create an action plan where there is gap. BAXCQC have developed an online assessment tool that can do just this for you so get in touch or book a call if you would like an initial demonstration.
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